


Lesser Evils

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 12:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6006097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack has returned to Rapture, and Brigid Tenenbaum gives the devil an ultimatum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lesser Evils

The little ones always greet Brigid with smiles, as bright as the sunlight they’ve been robbed of, when she returns to the safe house below Olympus Heights. But Brigid’s gun is one bullet too heavy — as heavy as the ocean, as heavy as sin — and she can’t make herself smile back.

She let one of them die.

The image, like thousands before it, is burned on the backs of her eyes: Jack staggering away from the crumpled, torn body, drunk off his first hit of raw ADAM, blood and the unspeakable polluting his hands and mouth. She must have said something to him, some scathing admonition, but she can’t remember it. It was swallowed by the ringing absence of a gunshot, drowned by the taste of bile in her mouth.

When Brigid heard Ryan’s announcement over the PA of a newcomer — an intruder — she knew it was a possibility. She prayed and prayed that it wouldn’t be, that the gentle child she’d known would never have to come back here. But he has returned, in the same sweater she gave him before Fontaine put him on that submarine, with the same black ink on his wrists.

( _Now you two got something in common_ , Fontaine had said when she confronted him about the tattoos. It took all her restraint not to put a pen through his eye.)

She never would have given a splicer the chance to do the right thing; any of them would be dead before getting that close to a little one. But she’d seen how gentle Jack was with his puppy, heard his sobs after Suchong forced his hands around her neck. She remembers the echoes of his screams reaching her laboratory the first time Suchong made him kill a man. _NO! Don’t make me don’t make me don’t—_

The memory makes her shudder. He was built to be a weapon, but he never showed any desire to kill. He never wanted to hurt anyone. From all she knew of him, she’d thought he would do the right thing, if only he was given the chance.

She was wrong. Watching one child kill another— Brigid thought she had seen all the horrors humanity had to offer, and she’d been wrong about that, too. And even though her pistol had been aimed at his head as he tore the slug from the little one’s belly, she hadn’t fired.

Brigid knows this: in a thousand lifetimes, in a thousand choices, she will never be able to shoot the boy she held as a baby.

“Mama Tenenbaum, what’s wrong?”

Brigid stops with her hand on the laboratory door. She schools her features, trying to keep what happened from showing on her face, before turning to look down at Rebecca. From her tone, it isn’t the first time she’s tried to get Brigid’s attention. Her chalk lies abandoned on the floor, and her eyes are wide with concern as she looks up at Brigid.

It cuts Brigid to the bone. She doesn’t deserve it. If Rebecca knew what happened in the Medical Pavilion…

She bends down to the girl's eye level, hoping her mask of calmness is convincing enough. “Nothing is wrong, _zeisele_. You have no need to worry.” Brigid wants to smooth Rebecca’s hair, offer some kind of physical reassurance, but the thought makes her feel sick. “Go back to your drawing. It looks very beautiful.”

“Okay.” Even if Rebecca doesn’t believe her — Brigid has never been good at reading subtle expressions — she goes back to her chalk flowers without arguing. Yellow daisies, not red roses. A small mercy.

Brigid steps into her lab, shutting the unlocked door behind her and leaning her back against it. Just one moment of weakness where they can’t see. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to force back the exhaustion seeping into her bones. Jack’s bloodstained sweater is in the darkness behind her eyelids.

She lied to Rebecca. Everything is wrong, and once again, she is to blame for it.

She and Jack aren’t the only ones with that girl’s blood on their hands, though. There is another. The man whose voice was on the radio, the man who encouraged Jack to commit such cruelty. Atlas, he calls himself. But Brigid knows Frank Fontaine better than anyone in Rapture, and she knows his handiwork when she sees it. From the moment the newspapers announced the shootout at Fontaine Fisheries, she knew it was a ruse. Fontaine wouldn't die so easily. And when Atlas rose up just in time to take advantage of the cracks Fontaine had left in Rapture’s foundation… a conclusion wasn’t hard to make.

Until now, there was no reason to risk letting him know she knows. Fontaine is a dangerous man, no matter what name he wears, and making an enemy of him would only make the girls less safe. But with the game between him and Ryan careening towards its end — with the last piece in play — there is no need for her to go along with his charade.

Brigid turns to the radio on her desk, changing the frequency to one Jack won’t be listening to. “You will _not_ tell him to slaughter my little ones, Fontaine.” Her former employer warrants no pleasantries, only cold, hard anger.

“You think I’m a ghost, now, Doctor?” Fontaine replies, not dropping the Atlas mask. “You really have gone mad. Fontaine’s been in the ground for months.”

“If that is true, he will not care if I _kindly_ tell Jack to remember him, yes?”

A short silence, and Brigid can picture the anger darkening his eyes. “I gotta say, I overestimated you. Never thought you’d be stupid enough to get in my way. Think you can threaten me that easy? How about this: when Ryan finds out you and those brats you stole are still in this fish tank, how long to you think it’ll take his goons to rip ‘em apart?”

“Herr Ryan is busy with what you brought into the city. _Und_ without Jack, you lose your last chance of defeating him.” She keeps her voice steady, unyielding, even when all she wants to do is scream at him for what he’s done.

Fontaine snorts. “Don’t bluff a man who knows the hand you’re holding.”

“This is no bluff.”

“Bullshit. You need Ryan dead as much as me. Long as he’s running Rapture, you ain’t never getting out. And that freak ain’t gettin’ to him without all the ADAM he can get his hands on.”

“For showing kindness to them, I give him enough ADAM that it will be making no difference. I will not stop you from taking the city, but _you will not_ tell him to hurt them.”

“Or else what?” There’s a growl in his voice, a threat that doesn't make Brigid flinch. His face may have changed, but he still doesn't like being told what to do.

“Or else your plan ends. Give him this choice, and I will not interfere.”

“Choice, huh? Getting a conscience made you that deluded? You forget you’re the one who—”

“I know what I have done, Frank.” She raises her voice above his, cutting him off. A gamble, she knows, but she can't stand listening to him recite her sins. “I will not be asking again.”

Silence on the other end, broken only by the sound of paper rustling. Tracking Jack’s progress, no doubt. Fontaine isn’t the kind of man to let his last gambit out of his sight. “You got enough ADAM to make it worth his while?”

“I do.”

More rustling, a quiet swear— and finally: “You got yourself a deal.” The radio crackles with a burst of static as Fontaine switches it back to Jack’s frequency.

Brigid lets out the breath she’s been holding. She could have negotiated for more— an exodus from the city for the little ones, or Jack’s safety once his purpose is done. But when Fontaine has control of the city, he will not hold himself to any promises. And that damned man is right: she needs Ryan's death as much as he does.

If Jack survives this, she doesn’t expect his forgiveness.

She tunes her radio back to the open frequency. To listen, not to talk. Jack says nothing as Fontaine feeds him another lie about a family that never existed, and Brigid rifles through the piles of notes in her desk drawers. Diagrams from the Protector Program, chromosomal analyses of the Little Sisters…

And there, hidden at the bottom of the last drawer, are her notes on Project W.Y.K. She spreads them out on her desk, scanning for details about the mental conditioning. Jack’s mind is Suchong’s work, not hers, but Brigid always kept an eye on the bastard. He hadn’t learned to hide his work well until after the first control mechanism was in place, and with the information she has here…

She reaches for a chewed-up pen and a scrap of paper. At the top, she writes and underlines one single phrase: _W.Y.K. removal procedure_. Fontaine never keeps what is useless to him. He will throw Jack away, once Ryan is dead— and when that happens, she will be ready.

He is not beyond redemption.


End file.
